So yes, ideophones do display regular correlations between sound and meaning. But then, sound and meaning are sometimes correlated in English in a similar way: if you put un- or in- in front of an adjective, you (usually) negate it; if you add -s, you make it a plural. It would be silly to claim that those regularities are sound-symbolic; they aren’t. What is it about the Korean sounds then that does make them symbolic? Do they really convey meaning all by themselves? To settle that question, we need to find out if people who don’t speak Korean have a hunch about these words. Of course, no one would be likely to guess the exact meaning of KAM-GAM, KKAM-KKAM and K’AM-K’AM, but it just might be possible for non-Koreans to intuit that the second and third words refer to a blacker darkness than the first. They might – and they actually do, as Korean linguist Nahyun Kwon discovered in her PhD research.